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Monday, 31 March 2014

Mars M&M's Vanilla Shake

Back in September last year, we saw Mars put out their last seasonal release of M&M's with the Raspberry flavour. It's about time for a new one, so here we are with Vanilla Shake. Read on for the review!

As far as I can tell, Vanilla is a fairly unique flavour to the M&M's range. It doesn't seem to have popped up on the international market either, beyond the reference I could find to Special Edition M&M's in the US in this 2007 blog post - and that is for Crispy M&M's with vanilla-flavoured chocolate. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between vanilla and and vanilla milkshake flavours, or why Mars felt the need to differentiate - perhaps milkshakes are easier to illustrate - but the ingredients doesn't specifically reveal any vanilla flavouring whatsoever. Generic 'flavours' is listed in the ingredients for the chocolate itself, with no additional information, so make of that what you will!

The pack is a soft baby blue in colour, a complete turnaround from the bold dark pink of Raspberry, or the other similarly bright colours in the M&M's range, and quite easy to spot on the shelf. The bag contains 200g, which is about standard for M&M's.

On opening, the bag has a strong vanilla cake scent laced with chocolate. It's a very sweet scent, and sure to permeate everywhere that it can, so store your uneaten M&M's in a ziplock bag. The bag contains a mix of regular-sized discs in dark brown, cream and baby blue colours, although the majority seemed to be blue. As expected, the candy shell is unflavoured; it's the chocolate that holds all the flavour.

There's been a bit of discussion lately on social media about the flavour of these M&M's. From what I've seen, a lot of people find these fairly similar to rgular milk chocolate M&M's. If the scent is anything to go by, that is definitely not the case, but I tried and tried but could not get a solid vanilla or milkshake flavour from these. It's a mildly sweet flavour that has a lot of generic cake notes. It's kind of warm and skirts the line of chocolate-iced cupcake far more than vanilla milkshake to me. I can see why people might call these milk chocolate - the flavour is subtle and similar, but definitely not the same.

I so wanted to like these, but unfortunately they have fallen far short of expectations.

Score: 2 out of 5 jelly beans.

Mars M&M's Vanilla Shake are made in Australia. They contain milk, soy and wheat, and may contain traces of peanuts, treenuts or barley.